eXeem, an encrypted, anonymized adware BitTorrent replacement put out by the folks behind Suprnova.org (the BitTorrent tracker site that shut down recently) seems to have materialized in beta.
Screenshots:
http://www.mitosis.com/sections/forum/showflat.php?Board=web_news&Number=43166
I just noticed that the rss feed page can be restricted by category.
So, if you’re just interested in, say, the DRM posts, you can use:
http://www.aquick.org/blog/wp-rss2.php?cat=15
and it’ll give you a feed with just those.
This describes a very (multi-thousand) frame per second camera array made out of cheap 30 fps CMOS cameras, with some software on the backend to synchronize the frames. Theoretically, I’d assume that they could just keep adding cameras to the limit of being able to tell what order the frames go in.
Fantastic piece on DRM by Cory Doctorow.
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/29/cory_responds_to_wir.html
I think this is a mostly accurate assessment, one that is not worded strongly enough.
But, there’s a distinction between “how things should be” and “how things are currently” that needs to be drawn.
Content owners, however unfortunate that may be, do call most of the shots, by virtue of the fact that they claim to do so. But there’s no reason to think that the public has to let them. In contracts, and more specifically, in policy, the guilty party that yells the loudest and makes the most demands can set the stage up however they want, and everyone who goes along with it gives them only more power to do so. This is the reality of intangible agreements, and the “rules” are whatever the content companies dictate and consumers accept. Or consumers dictate and content companies accept. If you disagree with this, you must speak. Verbally, with your wallet, in print, on the radio, on TV. Change the discourse.
I wholeheartedly agree with the point about using DRM to remove functionality included at the time of purchase, and shrouding it in ongoing rental/license fees as an excuse that you always have the choice to renew or cancel, and so promises they’ve made up to that point are somehow not required to be included in future negotiations. This sort of transaction is very much like a “sale”, but it is not a “sale”, even though most people continue to consider it such (because all they know is “sale”, and no one’s explained the new rules to them well enough). It differs from a “sale” in that it removes any obligation on the part of the producer/supplier to not reverse any of the terms of the transaction after the fact. Think about what that means for a second.. . .
Think about what it would be like if other things worked this way. Say you buy a microwave oven that comes with a “single touch popcorn function”. That’d be a selling point of the microwave, that would maybe encourage you to choose one kind of microwave over another. Now, say it’s a month later, and the popcorn function stops working. You’d expect the company to fix it, right? Now, what if when you ask them to fix it, they say “Sorry, we turned if off from here. If you want to make popcorn, you have to pay us another dollar.”? Do you? Or do you decide that the initial purchase was made on fraudulent terms and demand your money back?
Maybe, the argument goes, they won’t do this because then — who would buy their product in the future? But what if, at the same time, it became impossible to find a microwave with a built-in popcorn feature that was just “included”? That would be stupid, right? Maybe this is stretching the analogy a bit thin. Manufacturers should be adding features to get new customers, not taking them away. Except that you’re not looking at the right value proposition - the fact that you want to make popcorn in your microwave benefits the people who make the microwave in exactly zero ways, once you’ve already made the decision to buy the microwave… Unless, that is, they can get you to buy the ability to make popcorn again. Of course, they’d have to also find ways of getting you to think you still had a good deal, so you wouldn’t tell your friends what happened.
There are three possible outcomes:
1) Your microwave (and everything else digital, and that eventually means “everything”) starts to behave more like your cable box. Welcome to popcorn licensing.
2) Your cable box starts to behave like your microwave does today. Frankly, I just don’t see this happening.
3) We all step away and look at different pricing models for this business of bit pattern creation, and examine what the real value of this industry is, and where the trade-offs are.
Content companies spend millions per year on lobbying the government to change the “rules”.
Where are you in this discussion?
-
A thought occurred to me while thinking about the automatic keyword ad serving problem of avoiding potentially sensitive subjects - it’s probably possible to monitor something like this:
http://del.icio.us/tag/disaster
for related keywords and use those as the starting point for topics to avoid. There’s no reason to try to make this fully automated - let the distributed meat machine work for you.
It looks like The Incredibles has really fucked things up for the Fantastic Four movie.
22,000 people dead along the Indian Ocean coast, and all of the animals escaped. I guess this is what happens when you build houses and stuff.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3&art_id=qw1104305041706B224
A Columbia librarian walked every street in Manhattan between May 2002 and December 2004.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?050103ta_talk_mcgrath
His website, with lots of pictures, is here:
The feedburner rss feed Amazon ad insertion service is serving inappropriate ads.
I believe the Google context-sensitive ad service takes measures to prevent this sort of thing. They all should.
This is a screen capture from my bloglines page (not my blog):
I’ve notified feedburner of this, but I think it’s important to think about the implications in general. If we’re going to start inserting context-sensitive ads all over the place, there ought to be a little sensitivity to, say, the death of more than 75,000 people.
Amazon has added a 1-click donation page for tsunami aid donations. As of the time of this writing, they’ve collected almost $1.6M. If you haven’t given already, please consider it.
http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/PX3BEL97U9A4I/
This is a great story about a guy who retired to sell bagels on the honor system. It’s also an interesting glimpse into the sociology of white collar crime.
http://lair.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20040607/030488.html
Update: My friend Mark points out:
“As noted at the very very end of your link, this is actually from the NYTimes Magazine 6/6/2004 (where I first read it). Of course, you can no longer read it at NYTimes.com for free (too long ago), and it’s your choice to circumvent (c) by pointing to the blog entry. But you should at least give the proper credit in your lead-in, methinks.”
While credit is certainly due, I’m not sure I agree that it’s a copyright violation. It certainly is a sticky situation.
I think this may qualify as “copying for personal use” even though it happens to be accessible to the public. It looks like this may have come from the email list. The original ad is included, it links back to the source, and there’s no financial gain involved in distributing it. There’s ostensibly financial loss on the part of the NYT, because people who might have paid to view the full article now don’t have to. I will note that the NYT general terms of service includes no mention of articles sent via email. I will also note that this article does NOT appear in the Google cache, or even appear to be indexed at all by Google (although that may just have fallen into the hole where Google was unable to index new pages because they’d hit the 32-bit limit on their indexes, and not be directly copyright related).
But, let’s try to be fair about this. The NYT is charging $2.95 for back articles. That seems like a lot, although you get a bulk discount, which has never made sense to me for electronic content. Still, let’s call it a market rate of $3. Since they have a monopoly, they can set the price. So, I propose this. If you read this article and liked it, let’s be fair to the NYT, and try to convince them that they’ll do better by asking for money than by demanding it. Clearly, they can’t stop this article from being copied. I’m mostly of the opinion that they shouldn’t try.
So I’ve set up a dropcash donation page to make voluntary donations to the NYTimes for enjoying this fine piece of writing (and others).
http://www.dropcash.com/campaign/caviar/what_the_bagel_man_started/
“The New York Times charges for back articles. We think this is unfair and expensive. This is a voluntary fund to donate money to the New York Times as compensatory payment for viewing articles that have been copied. This is an exercise to convince the New York Times (and the content generation industry in general) that they can get more money by asking for it than by demanding it, and that we acknowledge that copying can’t be controlled.
For more background on how this came about, please see:
http://www.aquick.org/blog/index.php?p=430
This is a voluntary donation, I’m guessing it’s not tax deductible, and I hope it’s not an admission of guilt.
The New York Times, as far as I can tell, has no official channel for receiving paypal donations. I figure that Daniel Okrent, “the readers’ representative” is the right person to deal with this sort of thing, so I have used his address as the paypal recipient.
http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/thepubliceditor/index.html
I have chosen the current market cap of the NYT corporation (5.9B) as the goal for this campaign.”
Another update: It appears that the dropcash page doesn’t update the donated totals until the money has been approved by the recipient. Since the NY Times doesn’t officially accept paypal, they may never approve them, and so the donation page may never rise above zero. Please donate anyway.
(Also, don’t let this stop you from donating money to the Tsunami relief fund. Do both.)
“On March 2, 2003 at 4:12 pm, I disappeared.
My name is isabella v.
I’m twentysomething and I am an international fugitive.
My name is isabella v. But it isn’t.”
As jwz says: “Short version: heiress runs to escape arranged marriage; launders money, flees private security forces, hangs out with smugglers, blogs.”
This is very interesting. As part of the Lenovo/IBM deal, Lenovo management will give up control of the company to IBM top management, and move the company headquarters to Armonk. This sounds a lot like a reverse takeover.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/25/business/worldbusiness/25lenovo.html
Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=544&e=16&u=/ap/bush_federal_judges
The Red Cross has set up an online form for making donations to the Earthquake and Tsunami relief fund.
http://www.ifrc.org/helpnow/donate/donate_response.asp
I’m sure even $20 helps - give now, before you find an excuse to put it off!
Interesting piece on an informal survey of “how much did you get as the advance from your first novel?”.
http://www.justinelarbalestier.com/Musings/firstnoveladvances.htm
Overclock Remix is a site dedicated to taking music from old video games and “reimagining” them with current hardware.
Awesome.
It’s a 5×6 little packet with spices and some little sauce bottles for $30. Sadly, they included Tabasco instead of some small batch habanero sauce. But if you care about that, you probably carry your own bottle of that around too.
http://www.flight001.com/category.htm?viewbyid=11&viewbyitemid=245&step=0
It’s a bootable linux CD packed with games. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds quite cool.
Use the torrent if you can.
I keep hearing about how most of the good video games this year were sequels — Prince of Persia 2, Halo 2, Jak 3, Ratchet & Clank 3, Doom 3, GTA 5, Half-life 2, Viewtiful Joe 2 … the list just keeps going on. Even the ones that weren’t strictly sequels were franchise continuations instead of new worlds — World of Warcraft, every Star Wars game, the Bard’s Tale remake, a few LOTR games.
Some of these have shown up elsewhere, but this is a good, concise reference for lots of preferences you can change to speed up firefox.
http://www.tweakfactor.com/articles/tweaks/firefoxtweak/4.html
The core of this technique is to take a black frame (with the lens cap or a dark towel over the lens) at exactly the same ISO and exposure time settings, then subtract that frame from your image. This should give you a much clearer image with much less noise. This technique has been floating around for a while, but this is a very clear description of the process, plus a very strong background explanation of why it works and what kinds of noise it doesn’t fix.
Unrestricted adult programming. Some porn, but not all porn. Sitcoms, dramas, news (?), etc… Just like a regular TV station, but with cursing, violence, nudity, and fucking. I’m surprised this hasn’t happened sooner.
“Whole Foods Markets is reconsidering whether to continue selling a line of microwaveable stuffed animals that an educator said could lead children to believe there is nothing wrong with putting their pets in household appliances.”
How did this get past the focus groups?!?
While I’m sure at least some of this is due to the valiant efforts of our ER and paramedic staff (people are less likely to actually die when attacked), and I’ve noticed an increase in news reporting of other street crimes (even if they’ve actually declined overall), it seems that, for the 14th year in a row, the NYC murder rate is down…
So, I extend a general thanks to the rest of New York, for less killing of each other.
The EFF has backed Tor:
“Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and more. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.”
We get more benefits out of having our legitimate communications encrypted (and protected from criminals) than criminals do by being able to hide. Strong crypto is always available if you want it. Covert channels are possible. Again, here’s an object lesson in Turing-Completeness.
The overall premise is this - Turing described a certain kind of basic computer that’s the baseline for computability. If another computer is “equivalent” to this (or instead, two computers are equivalent to each other), it can perform the same calculations - i.e.: take the same input and give the same output. There’s a principle in there (I’m not sure if it has a name) that says that it doesn’t matter if the alphabets are the same - the computation is still equivalent if the two machines are both Turing-complete, so some alphabets are interchangeable with others. This is how we get from computers processing zeroes and ones to human-readable text, images, and eventually moving images on the screen or other output device - alphabets can be encoded, and they’re still equivalent.
I’ve simplified things a bit.
This is a fundamental difference between digital computers and everything else. Computers are modeling devices capable of emulating a wide range of other things. Because of the interchangeability principles, the underlying restrictions and capabilities remain, regardless of what kind of representation you’re talking about. This has implications for encryption, digital media, and basically everything else we do with computers. More to the point, it has implications for trying to restrict what any given user wants to do by encoding some information as a digital signal, and the fact that pretty much, you can’t - they can always change the alphabet on you.
Examples of this are all over the place –
A lot of my friends work at banks or other large corporations that try to restrict what traffic can flow in and out of their network. They block ports, or they don’t allow certain protocols. Every one of my friends has successfully bypassed these restrictions by tunelling whatever they wanted to do over a different protocol. If you allow ssh, you allow everything to someone who can use ssh and is clever enough to realize that. Bits are fungible - it doesn’t matter to the computer what comes in or goes out, as long as there’s another translation program that can change one alphabet to another.
It’s currently possible to equip your car with a device that will let you open the door by knocking a certain pattern on the window. This is a perfect example of a covert channel - the alphabets are interchangeable, so your car can translate an unadvertised and hidden series of knocks into “open the door”, and it doesn’t fundamentally matter what the series of knocks was, or even that there was a series of knocks at all. It still means “open the door”. Bits are fungible.
The same principle is at work with digital media. When you play a movie, bits are read in, and transformed to a moving image of pixels. Here’s the important part. Unless you’re going to restrict access to the hardware (which is where the dreaded DRM “black box” comes in), even if the source file was encrypted and restricted, the machine on which you’re going to play it back still has to unencrypt it and display it. At that point, it can be captured and transformed into whatever form you want. Bits are fungible.
Bits are fungible. This is why “copy protection” is incompatible with general computing. If you allow general computing, bits can always be exchanged for other bits.
It’s also why encryption is not the same thing as security, why the bad guys will always have encryption, and why the EFF backing strong encryption is important for digital freedom.
Any questions?
My friend Rob and some of his co-workers made this movie. It’s The Pulp Fiction trailer audio mixed to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.
It’s awesome!
This will definitely be welcome. I can’t say how many times my laptop battery has suddenly kicked out while the meter read 20-50%.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/23/technology/circuits/23next.html
One hardware expert’s nightmare with DRM-protected content.
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1765/
This isn’t good for anybody. It’s a poor consumer experience, it’s alienating, it’s difficult to set up, it makes you feel like a criminal.
AND IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY STOP ANYBODY WHO WANTS TO PIRATE THE MOVIE. Software DRM never fully can. This is why we say that copy control is mutually exclusive with open computing.
I think the people who are pushing this terrible technology on us need a lesson in Turing Completeness.
(Update: I wrote a longer piece on this.)